Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry & Belief from the Bible to the Present 
by 

Harold Bloom

 

Between Truth and Meaning

To call Harold Bloom’s aesthetic theory complex is a fatuous understatement (he probably would call it a litotes). Whatever might be said about it is probably wrong. Therefore I feel emboldened to give my errant opinion with minimal embarrassment. Here goes:

One plus one equals two: a truth without meaning. Marriage is an eternal union of a man and a woman: a proposition with meaning whose truth is intrinsically uncertain and ultimately irrelevant. This distinction truth/meaning is important. Hannah Arendt made it the central concept of her The Life of the Mind in 1971 but I don’t know if she was influenced by Bloom or vice versa. 

There are criteria for determining truth found in logic, science, and what is generally called common sense. But naked truth has no necessarily reactive effect on the mind. Meaning is more or less immune to truth. The blatant lies of Trump have positive meaning for his followers who know they are lies; and are equally meaningful for his opponents who recognise the man’s mendacity.

According to Bloom, between these two realms of truth and meaning there is another distinct literary axis which ultimately determines the constitution of truth and the direction of meaning. This is the domain of poetry and belief. These are opposing aesthetic categories that are employed in various combinations to support/generate/justify both truth and meaning.

Belief has confidence in language, a presumption that it can be ‘held’ and ‘fixed’ consciously by a mind (as in religious doctrine), and that it endures by a concerted, even stubborn, act of will. Poetry actively resists the tenets of belief. Its explicit intention is the undermining of linguistic certainty by breaking the conventions of language from vocabulary to grammar. Poetry may be memorised but it is never ‘held’ in any certain way. Rather poetry generates more poetry, largely through its influence on the unconscious mind. 

Both belief and poetry dominate our intellectual lives no matter what the subject. So, for example the criteria of scientific truth are clearly unscientific as confirmed by their evolution over time and their differences among scientific disciplines. Ultimately the criterion employed in any discipline depends upon both a rather poetic feel of rightness, and the beliefs of scientists about the fundamental purpose of their work. In other words what constitutes meaningful truth.

Similarly, the work of writers of fiction, although hardly conforming to a novelistic template, for example, do adhere to some sort of structure in narrative development in order to convey some degree of facticity (to use Bloom’s term for context). Yet what they write is largely judged upon their ability to innovate the mundane, prosaic, static character of life, language, and the merely obvious into something original, perhaps even strange. Thus producing meaningful truth.

It is in terms of poetics and beliefs, therefore, that Bloom conducts his criticism. Both categories are in some sense divine, that is, their source lies outside of what we can determine or control as human beings. They arrive, as it were, from elsewhere. Whether they are God-given or a product of the Collective Unconscious is irrelevant. They come to us, usually embedded in a culture so that they appear as ‘already there,’ that is, as effectively eternal.

For Bloom our inheritance of poetics and beliefs is a challenge as well as a blessing. If we take them seriously, we are bound to fight them, to strive beyond blind acceptance to further interpretations and combinations that express ourselves. In a sense we honour tradition by overcoming it, by creating a new tradition in which the old is visible but only as the old. We have a drive to transcend and replace but not to destroy.

Such transcendence of culture, even merely linguistic culture, is no easy task. Success requires a profound understanding of our existing culture. This implies an exceptional talent and experience with symbolic manipulation - with language, music, material art, narrative themes and development, etc. But success also demands an ability to withstand what Bloom calls the ‘anxiety of influence,’ the fear and distress involved in presuming to attempt to surpass one’s forebears.

Bloom’s aesthetic theory is remarkable in many ways. For example, he has ‘tested’ it repeatedly in individual cases in every era and with every genre from Ancient Greek philosophy to modern graphic novels. But what I find most remarkable is his application of his concept to literally all of Western literature as he does in this volume. Whether one agrees with Bloom or not, his insights about the sources and subsequent trajectory of Western literature are as unforgettable as they are bold - perhaps because these characteristics imply one another.

In the aesthetic playground of the poetic and the believed it is sometimes difficult to tell which is the actor and which is the acted upon. Even more disconcerting, they sometimes imitate or even become the other as they seek to create new truths and new meanings. Therefore any definitive statement about their respective roles is suspect because the two act in conjunction.

Nevertheless it is possible to at least conceptually isolate the two in a kind of literary differential calculus in which other things are held equal for the purpose of analysis. So Bloom identifies two primary sources for our literary culture. 

The first is the so-called Jahwist of the Hebrew Bible, the unknown interpolator to the Torah (the first five books). It is the Jahwist who is responsible for the second creation story in Genesis in which Adam is created from red clay and the breath of God (a poetic joke amidst an aesthetic dominated by belief: Adam is the name, adamah is what he’s made from). Bloom calls the Jahwist eccentric because his speciality is irony, a sort of pained belief which permeates the rest of the Bible and erupts periodically, perhaps most explicitly in the books of the prophet Jeremiah, Job, and Qoholeth (Ecclesiastes).*

The second source of Western literature is poetic, that of the equally unknown contributor to the Greek myths of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer. Like the Bible, these myths were transmitted orally for some extended but indeterminate period before they were written. They are also the product of a process of redaction, addition, and transcendence similar to that of the Bible. While it is a work of historical fiction, it also communicates an enormous amount of what can be called the belief system of the ancient Greeks - among others, their psychology, conception of the body, human purpose, and virtue, all very different from that of the Bible. But there is a peculiar congruence between the Bible and the Iliad: irony. The irony of the Jahwist is matched by that of Homer in the latter’s portrayal of the fate of his heroes and their gods.

These two works, according to Bloom, establish the tradition of Western literature. At its best this literature shares in their ironic character regardless of how any particular work plays with poetry and belief. For Bloom, literary playfulness as well as artistry, that is to say originality, reaches its English apotheosis in Shakespeare, whose masterful irony is simply unmatched by any other writer. He thus almost miraculously is able to create meaningful truths like no other. 

I don’t think it is, therefore, too much to conclude that Bloom’s critical aesthetic criterion is essentially creative irony, which through its very innovation is subtle and startling in equal measure. He takes his title from Marvel’s remark about Milton’s Paradise Lost. Marvell feared that Milton would taint established Christian conventions in his poem. When Milton’s work was finished, he was glad to see that Milton had not contradicted church doctrine. What he failed to notice however was that Milton had transformed the YHWH of the Hebrew Bible into himself. An irony tough to top.

I share Bloom’s view of irony, whether because I have assimilated it progressively from reading Bloom or because he confirms something I have felt from childhood. At a fairly early age I made an explicit decision to devote myself to a life of the mind, that is to say, language. But as I matured it became clear that I had entered a sort of contract with the devil that made me vulnerable to scientific rationality on the one hand and the literalism of the humanities on the other. What I experienced in the enclosure of poetry and belief was not normal, or at least not all that common among people I knew.

I suspect that Bloom perceived the same irony as I, namely that the playground of poetry and belief ultimately had only the most tenuous connection with what most folk think of as the realities of truth and meaning in the working world, and it provides no defences for itself. It is simply not possible to construct a theory that reliably connects language with what is not language. Engaging in the attempt is useless. Or said a rather different way: language is the ultimate irony, a blessing and a curse from which we cannot escape. Apparently this is frightening to many.

* In light of this it is easy to understand Jesus as the ultimate irony extending from the mind of the Jahwist: the crucified king, the suffering God, the beloved but abandoned son etc.